Selection Day by Aravind Adiga (Picador, £16.99)
The selection day in Booker-winner Aravind Adiga’s title is for Mumbai under-19 cricketers. It’s a day when promising young men discover whether the most extravagant form of that promise—ascent from obscurity, perhaps desperate obscurity, to being a celebrity adored by billions and the wealth that comes with it—has any chance of coming good.
Adiga follows two such young men from the slummy suburb of Dahisar. Mohan Kumar, breeder of champions and seller of chutneys, places most hope in his older son, Radha, whose looks are as impressive as his batting and who has already appeared on television.
But the centre of the story is the younger son, Manjunath, a daydreamer whose powerful forearms excite coaches and talent scouts. Can he fulfil his cricketing promise? And how does he cope with the intensity of his feelings for another young player?
Selection Day is a more interesting and less comfortable construction than that summary would suggest. Adiga’s close third-person narrative shifts restlessly from head to head, discovering in each another self-assigned hero’s quest, from Mohan’s champion-breeding to the Economist-fuelled entrepreneurial dreams of the boys’ financial backer, a stockbroker’s son whose experiment in cricket sponsorship was inspired by the romance of international match-fixing.
In the process it picks up and grinds down the clichés of sporting stories and contemporary Indian fiction. The critique can sometimes be a bit too self-conscious—there’s a derisive reference to “all that Jhumpa Lahiri stuff”—but the characters remain both convincing and surprising, as does the outcome. The jokes are good, too.
The selection day in Booker-winner Aravind Adiga’s title is for Mumbai under-19 cricketers. It’s a day when promising young men discover whether the most extravagant form of that promise—ascent from obscurity, perhaps desperate obscurity, to being a celebrity adored by billions and the wealth that comes with it—has any chance of coming good.
Adiga follows two such young men from the slummy suburb of Dahisar. Mohan Kumar, breeder of champions and seller of chutneys, places most hope in his older son, Radha, whose looks are as impressive as his batting and who has already appeared on television.
But the centre of the story is the younger son, Manjunath, a daydreamer whose powerful forearms excite coaches and talent scouts. Can he fulfil his cricketing promise? And how does he cope with the intensity of his feelings for another young player?
Selection Day is a more interesting and less comfortable construction than that summary would suggest. Adiga’s close third-person narrative shifts restlessly from head to head, discovering in each another self-assigned hero’s quest, from Mohan’s champion-breeding to the Economist-fuelled entrepreneurial dreams of the boys’ financial backer, a stockbroker’s son whose experiment in cricket sponsorship was inspired by the romance of international match-fixing.
In the process it picks up and grinds down the clichés of sporting stories and contemporary Indian fiction. The critique can sometimes be a bit too self-conscious—there’s a derisive reference to “all that Jhumpa Lahiri stuff”—but the characters remain both convincing and surprising, as does the outcome. The jokes are good, too.
